Far Beyond Tractors: Envirotech and the Intersections of Technology, Agriculture, and the Environment

摘要

Many years ago, in 1973, historian Clarence F. Danhof lamented that scholars of agricultural history had generally failed to address broad interpretive questions and often produced works of little significance for the historical profession. Eighteen years after that, the prominent historian of technology Deborah Fitzgerald wrote in Technology and Culture of the needs and opportunities for more serious, sophisticated, and critical studies of the relationships between technology and agriculture. In particular, Fitzgerald called on scholars to seek alternatives to narratives of agricultural "progress" measured largely in terms of the conquest of nature and raw increases in farm productivity.